{"id":4427,"date":"2011-07-02T17:34:23","date_gmt":"2011-07-02T17:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/?p=4427"},"modified":"2011-07-02T17:34:57","modified_gmt":"2011-07-02T17:34:57","slug":"on-friends-and-friendships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/on-friends-and-friendships\/","title":{"rendered":"On Friends and Friendships"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-family: Tahoma\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/1.bp.blogspot.com\/_z_7Jf5zZa7s\/TKcd2x0kU0I\/AAAAAAAAAJQ\/_sBzhDmx6Dk\/s1600\/friendship.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"255\" \/>Friends truly make life a blessing. Whether you have one or one hundred  friends makes no difference, as long as you have in your life a  direction where you can direct and express the love in your heart. For a  child a friend may be a doll or a favorite toy. Though the doll is  un-animated and without a soul, it functions as a way for the child to  express his or her inner desire to love unconditionally. A child is  overflowing with love and yearns to be cradled in loving arms, so much  so that she will bestow so much love on her toys. The very act of giving  love allows the child to also feel and receive love.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>For many a pet acts as a best friend. The two main things a dog desires  are food and love. They are such simple and divine creatures! No wonder  dog spelled backwards is god. <span style=\"font-family: Tahoma\">What are the qualities that make a dog so lovable? <\/span><span style=\"font-family: Tahoma\">A  dog will love you even when you look and feel your worst. It does not  judge you by your clothes, your education, your income, the kind of car  you drive, nor the house you live in. A dog is simply content to be your  presence&#8230;and with a bowl of kibbles nearby. Are these qualities not  what we seek in a true friend (minus the kibbles)? Do we possess these  qualities ourselves towards our friends?<\/span><\/p>\n<p>They say that in your life you if you can count the number of true  friends on one hand you are a lucky person. I have been a loner for most  of my life but I have also had some wonderful friends&#8230;<span style=\"font-family: Tahoma\">from my teenage years I had <\/span><span style=\"font-family: Tahoma\">my  dogs, Scamper and Blackie. I remember coming home from school and  they&#8217;d see me from a block away and start barking in excitement as I&#8217;d  approach. I would run with joy just to get there five seconds earlier,  not to miss a moment of the happiness and love we felt together.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>My guitar and music were (and are) unique friends since almost as long  as I can remember. Many times, most times actually, I&#8217;d stay home to be  with them rather than go out. Parties and socializing never interested  me too much. In those atmospheres there is too much heart-detachment.  Loud places with intoxicated people are not places where the heart  shines. The heart desires intimacy, to know the depths of a person&#8217;s  soul. Thus my music and I communed in a mystical language, beyond words,  through the heart and into the divine.<\/p>\n<p>I am blessed to have sacred human friends, that I have loved and still  love. Even if we do not talk or see each other I am with them, and they  are with me. I know when they are down, happy, ill, and so on, simply  through an energetic connection of love. A few weeks ago I had a vision  of a friend. In it she was very thin, frail and not well. I had not been  in contact with her for perhaps a year or more so I sent her a  concerned email and gently mentioned this vision, though I didn&#8217;t want  to alarm her. She wrote back saying that I was correct, that she had  lost a lot of weight and was quite frail and was losing hair. I believe  that just knowing that she was in my energy field helped her feel  supported and cared for. And this is the essence of friendship, that we  experience each other with profound depth, to make it known by words,  thoughts and actions, that we abide with one another in love no matter  the distance.<\/p>\n<p>Another point to understand is the friendship we have towards ourselves.  This is the most fundamental, for if we cannot love ourselves then  loving another is impossible. The amount in which we can love another is  directly related to depth of self-love we possess. Of course, this love  has nothing to do with ego &#8211; a distorted, self-engrossed admiration of  our physical beauty or talents. In self-love we can appreciate these  things about ourselves, but they do not define us. A friendship with the  self is that of compassion and forgiveness. We are not perfect and have  erred in the past. But there is a perfect essence within us that is  capable of unconditional love, profound wisdom, grace, and amazing acts  of kindness. We all possess this essence. As we acknowledgment and  remember this divine-self a relationship develops. And as we become more  familiar with this divine self&#8217;s capabilities and attributes a  friendship grows.<\/p>\n<p>This is why many sages of the past of said to &#8220;befriend your soul.&#8221; Your  soul is you at your best and is connected to other souls and ultimately  to the universal soul. Living through the heart without any gap or  distance from your soul is the Tao; the way to be your own best friend  and also to be the kind of friend a friend would like to have.<\/p>\n<p>Blessings,<\/p>\n<p>Johannes \/ Sevara<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Friends truly make life a blessing. Whether you have one or one hundred friends makes no difference, as long as you have in your life a direction where you can direct and express the love in your heart. For a child a friend may be a doll or a favorite \u2026<\/p>\n<p class=\"continue-reading-button\"> <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/on-friends-and-friendships\/\">Continue reading<i class=\"crycon-right-dir\"><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[4299,4300],"class_list":["post-4427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality","tag-friends","tag-friendship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4427"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4430,"href":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4427\/revisions\/4430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/divineearth.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}